Video denoising for camera sensors has been the area of much research and development work in the past decades. Noise is a serious problem in a lot of sensors, especially when shooting in low lighting conditions and under varying illumination conditions. Also, correct performance of other video processing algorithms often requires noise reduction. In video encoding, video denoising can lead to bit stream size reduction that is achieved, among others, by increased performance of specific modules (e.g., motion estimation algorithm) in the encoder unit. The performance of image, video, and computer vision algorithms (e.g. tracking and detection) may also depend on the level of noise in the signal.
It would be beneficial to provide improved methods and apparatus for video denoising.